As the Madre Fire dwindles down, the acreage burned shows it’s clearly the largest fire in the state so far this year, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's all bad.
“This fire actually might be beneficial for the landscape to kind of revive it, revitalize some of the ecology," said Cal Poly Assistant Professor Dr. Ashley Grupenhoff.
The large grassland fire burned quickly off of Highway 166, spreading thousands of acres in just the first day.
“We've got the terrain, the fuel type, we've got 166, we've got some cultural assets that we're taking into consideration,” said Madre Fire Public Information Officer Kimberly Kaschalk.
Grupenhoff is a fire ecologist and a member of Cal Poly’s Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Institute and showed KSBY, through mapping on CalTopo.com, the historical context of fire in the area where the Madre Fire is burning.
“This is the fire history from 2000 and we can kind of see some small, small fires, not a lot of prescribed burning out here," Grupenhoff explained. "When the Madre Fire did occur, [it] kind of exploded, I guess is how people are talking about it.”
For wildfires in general, Grupenhoff explained that there are three main questions to ask: “What kind of fire is it? When is that fire happening? Is that fire threatening?"
With Kaschalk adding, "how we're going to handle that and [how] you come up with a plan unique to that area.”
For the Central Coast, Grupenhoff says it is tricky, with differing topography that makes every fire unique.
“It's a little bit trickier to understand kind of the timing and what we really need to be doing to get this landscape in a place that we can have humans be safe and structures safe, but also have a resilient ecosystem," she said.
As the largest fire in the state this year settles down, while scary for residents who saw structures threatened, Grupenhoff says that fires like this in areas that haven’t burned in a while can be a good thing under the right circumstances.
“It's good to get fire back on the land," Grupenhoff said. "If we make sure it's not doing damage to cultural resources and to important botanical and ecological resources and it's not hurting homes and, and people, we're looking good."
As of Thursday afternoon, the Madre Fire had burned 80,786 acres and was 67% contained.
It broke out on July 2, along Highway 166 between Santa Maria and Cuyama.
One structure has burned and one firefighter injury has been reported.
